The circular demand… The staged demand, exposed, liberated and revealed; it is a demand that requires the being to spread out in an oscillation that is turning around, a movement that goes from the innermost to the outermost, from nondeveloped inwardness to alienating acting-out. Maurice Blanchot was probably one of the first who clearly identified this turn of mind before adding “… alienation that acts out until it reaches a fulfilled and re-internalized fullness. A movement that is endless yet accomplished ”. There is indeed this dizziness in Katia Bourdarel’s works, a sort of reenergizing that, beyond figures, beyond what there is to see, opens onto the unfathomable relation that each and every one of us maintains with reality. It is an essential and paramount question, probably the only one today worth being asked. This relation to oneself unveils the unfathomable difficulty to transcribe again what the world gives us, and what we give to it in return; from this relation springs the strange conviction that there is in this act something that gets lost andthat fades. Hence the artist’s will to work using inspiration from her immediate environment, her experience as a woman and also as a mother. However, this artistic way of doing things should not be seen through the easy prism of feminism or even a social protest. It would actually be the contrary. Katia Bourdarel’s need to tell us about herself and the world is implicit, almost hidden, concealed, and embodied in a few themes that are as many veils that should be lifted carefully. Actually, the entire work of this secretive artist fights our world. It fights everyone giving in to the endless ferocity of an outrageous liberalism which sole aim is to transform our dreams into duly quantified needs. Katia Bourdarel bears in mind this stimulated resignation that is the privilege of our civilizations, and turns it over and inside out, proving at the same time that it is still possible to re-enchant our world.

The exhibition Psyche’s Nights at galerie Eva Hober in Paris, in 2012, is therefore about Psyche ans Eros.. Let us remember how Psyche, in Greek mythology, embodies the human soul searching a form of absolute that is love. But there are darker, and more terrible forces hiding behind the notion of absolute. The story of Psyche and Eros is above all the story of being put to the test, of a series of uninterrupted wounds to the soul, of confusion, of impossibilities to see and understand the other, and accept them and their implacable singularity. Many episodes remain marked by visible violence in the way that their characters are enslaved by their family and friends, and enemies. The gods’ intervention is therefore needed to detangle the threads of these tragic destinies. Since the Renaissance, artists have used this theme to not only sing the praises of love, but also to expose the dark resorts of human nature. From Raphael’s frescoes in Rome’s Villa Farnesina to Caravaggio (Psyche Received Into Olympus, 1524), Boucher (Marriage of Psyche and Eros, 1744), or even Fragonard (Psyche showing her Sister her Gifts from Cupid, 1753), all of them obviously insisted on the sensual aspect of the encounter, insisting on how much such a theme allowed to expose the secrets of the feminine body, if not the resorts of the human soul. But beyond the eroticism that is both idealized and too often simulated (especially in Bouguereau’s The Abduction of Psyche, 1895), Psyche and Eros release terrible forces that will make up the hotbed of a form of melancholy, which of course, is where Katia Bourdarel’s works tend to go. By drawing her inspiration from Antonio Canova whose Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1793) and Love and Psyche (circa 1793) represent a height of classical art, Katia Bourdarel amplifies a tension between what is brought to sight – two bodies in love- and what remains concealed but is nonetheless the main subject of the exhibition, even if, using a falsely detached tone, she does not hesitate to declare : “ Most of the time, my work starts with a vague intuition fed by remnants of knowledge of the myth or the tale. I start researching after that first trigger. The narrative is an excuse for form and matter, and it may also be a sort of filter, a way to conceal or legitimate my questioning behind the permanence of the myth. It is the little story next to the big story. The feelings, either experienced or enhanced, is what remains paramount, therefore the poetical wanderings are more important than knowledge. ”